Closed Gates and Dark Streets: Spaces and Infrastructures of Transit in the Low Countries, Eighteenth–Nineteenth Centuries

This chapter explores historiography on urban mobility and combines debates from different fields of travel, transport, and migration history. It introduces a spatial approach and a technonatural perspective to infrastructures of migration in an urban context, focusing on the period of the highly debated mobility transitions of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It analyses changes in migration infrastructures by focusing on the role and agency of nature and technology in transport and mobility, particularly for people arriving in and passing through the city. As such, it sheds a new light on debates that have mostly focused on migration regulation and social control. It takes inspiration from the recently emerging spaces of arrival debate and builds on and takes them a step further by analysing technonatural entanglements of mobility infrastructures, particularly focusing on transient migration.